The invention relates to the field of nanoelectromechanical structures (NEMS), and in particular to nanoelectromechanical dielectric perturbation on degenerate modes of integrated waveguides to access all polarization states reconfigurably, while permitting high-density optical integration.
With the current drive towards silicon microphotonics monolithically integrated with advance electronics, signal polarization states in transmission fibers are stochastic, leading to significant pulse distortion and system impairments at high transmission rates (above 10 Gb/s for example) or long fiber spans (10,000 km for example). The temporal random-walk process of the polarization states is estimated on order of milliseconds, arising from loss of circular symmetry due to external stress or temperature fluctuations on the fibers. Moreover, PMD varies with signal frequencies and thus mitigation must be performed channel-by-channel. This thus defines the need for a low cost, scalable compensator at few kHz.